Page 29 of Please Save Me

I rolled my eyes and kicked my feet onto the coffee table. “It was fine. Today's been rough, though.”

“Rough how?”

I scratched my jaw as I thought about a nice way to put it.

“Mae has been very… sensitive?” Was that a good way to put it?

Sophia laughed into her wine. “You’ll get used to it. It’s part of her charm.”

Sophia’s smile at the end of her sentence was almost disarming, but what she said wasn’t.

“She’s like this outside of pregnancy?” I was really hoping it was just hormones, especially because she wasn’t like this a few weeks ago.

Sophia nodded. “I’m sure being pregnant doesn’thelp,but that’s just how Mason gets when she’s overwhelmed.”

I shifted around, and for the first time, I actually had to consider my relationship with Mason. It was one thing to deal with her being like this when there was an end in sight, but it was another to have her having mini-tantrums forever, possibly.

“It’s a lot.” I breathed, trying to wrap my head around the idea.

Still, knowing Mason’s attitude washerproblem and not her actually being afraid of me was comforting.

“Yeah, but I guess that’s just how autism works,” Sophia spoke casually as she leaned into me.

I raised one brow as I watched Sophia, waiting for her to crack a smile or tell me that it was a joke. But Sophia wasn’t one to joke about something like that.

“What’s that got to do with Mason?”

“Mason’s autistic… You didn’t know that?” Sophia tipped her head and looked at me like I was dumber than a sack of rocks.

My nose scrunched. “She ain’t autistic.”

We had a little boy who went to my church who was autistic. He didn’t speak, he couldn’t sit still, and he’d have meltdowns that resulted in him screaming and hitting people. He couldn’t help it, so I did my best not to judge him. Mason didn’t do any of that.

“Uh, yeah,she is?” Sophia snorted. “There’s some level system I don’t fully understand. All I know is when she gets too worked up withanyemotion, she has a meltdown…. Or I guess more sheneedsto have a meltdown. She’sreallygood at suppressing them, which just draws the process out. And just makes her a mess until she does it.”

“Soph, this ain’t funny,” I warned.

“What’s not?”

I started to get hot under the collar, so I pulled it away from myself. “This joke.”

“You honestly think I’d joke about that?” she challenged. “Think about all her little quirks, how she claps and squeals when she’s excited, how she always picks at something, the way she gags if she has to touch a felt blanket—”

“Okay, so she’s a littleeccentric.” That’s a nice way to say she was weird. But I liked her little oddities. They gave her character.

Sophia’s eyes cut into me like a sapphire knife.

“This literally isn’t worth arguing about. And also—autism isn’t a bad thing.”

“I didn’t say it was—never mind.” I rubbed my face, not willing to draw this out. “How was your time with Lucian?”

The anger from Sophia’s face drained as she ran a finger around the rim of her wine glass. “Fine, I guess… we had to have a big talk about his relationship with Mason.”

My eyes widened. I knew those two weren’t going to break up; Luce just loved her too much to let her go. Still, I wanted to knowwhatthat big talk could have been.

Chapter 9

Cameron

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